Choking On A Glut Of Plenty

Consumption, Competition, Contentment

When It Comes To How We Live, More Is Less

September 1, 1991|By Alan Durning, Technology Review

Consumption has become a central pillar of life in industrial nations and is even embedded in social values. The Japanese speak of the ''new three sacred treasures'': color television, air-conditioning and the automobile.

The affluent lifestyle born in the United States is emulated by those who can afford it around the world. And many can: The average person is four and a half times richer than were his or her great-grandparents at the turn of the century.

But the wealth is unevenly spread. One billion live in unprecedented luxury, 1 billion in destitution. American children have more pocket money - $230 a year - than the half-billion poorest people.

In the United States, the world's premier consuming society, the average person owns twice as many cars, drives two and a half times as far, uses 21 times as much plastic and travels 25 times as far by air as did a person in 1950.

Air-conditioning spread from 15 percent of households in 1960 to 64 percent in 1987, and color television from 1 percent to 93 percent. Not since the 1920s was conspicuous consumption so lauded as in the 1980s.

During that decade, microwave ovens and videocassette recorders found their way into almost two-thirds of American homes. Between 1978 and 1987, sales of Jaguar automobiles increased eightfold, and the average age of first-time buyers of fur coats fell from 50 to 26.

The select club of U.S. millionaires more than doubled to 1.5 million over the decade. Japan and Western Europe display parallel trends.

Per person, the Japanese consume more than four times as much aluminum, almost five times as much energy and 25 times as much steel as they did in 1950. And they own four times as many cars and eat nearly twice as much meat. Ironically, in 1990 a reja bumu (leisure boom) and concern for nature combined to create two new status symbols: British four-wheel-drive Range Rovers and cabins made of American logs.

As in Japan, West European consumption is only a notch below that in the United States.

France, the former West Germany and the United Kingdom have almost doubled their per capita use of steel, more than doubled their intake of cement and aluminum, and tripled paper consumption since midcentury.

Just in the first half of the '80s, per capita consumption of frozen prepared meals rose more than 30 percent in every West European country except Finland; in Switzerland, the jump was 180 percent.

In Eastern Europe, the collapse of socialist governments unleashed a tidal wave of consumer demand.

A young man in a Budapest bar captured his country's mood when he said, ''People in the West think that we in Hungary don't know how they live. Well, we do know how they live, and we want to live like that, too.''

Those living in the former East Germany bought 200,000 used Western cars in the first half of 1990 alone.

In China, between 1982 and 1987, color TVs spread from 1 percent to 35 percent of urban homes, the share with washing machines quadrupled from 16 percent to 67 percent and refrigerators grew in prevalence from 1 percent to 20 percent of homes.

In India, an emerging middle class of perhaps 100 million members, a liberalized consumer market and the introduction of buying on credit have led to explosive growth in sales of everything from cars to frozen dinners.

Few would begrudge anyone the simple advantages of cold food storage or mechanized clothes washing. The point is that non-Western nations are emulating the high-consumption lifestyle - and that long before all the world can achieve the American dream, the planet will be laid waste.

For one thing, supporting the lifestyle of the world's 1 billion meat-eaters, car-drivers and throwaway consumers requires resources from far away.

For example, a Dutch person's food, wood, natural fibers and other products of the soil exploit five times as much land outside the country as inside - much of it in the Third World.

Beyond environmental costs, some perplexing findings throw doubt on the wisdom of consumption as a personal and national goal: Rich societies have had little success in turning consumption into fulfillment.

Whatever Americans are buying, it doesn't seem to be enough. Regular surveys by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago reveal, for example, that no more Americans report they are very happy now than in 1957.

The share has fluctuated around one-third since then, despite a doubling of per capita spending on personal consumption.

Yet few who can afford high consumption opt to live simply.

What prompts us to consume so much?

In the anonymous mass societies of advanced industrial nations, daily interactions with the economy lack the face-to-face character prevailing in local communities.

Traditional virtues like integrity, honesty and skill are too hard to measure to serve as yardsticks of social worth.

By default, they are supplanted by a simple indicator - money.

As a Wall Street banker put it bluntly to The New York Times, ''Net worth equals self-worth.''